Learn Our History’s latest film, One Nation Under God, celebrates and explains the crucial role that God has played in America's founding and development - and helps children understand how all of our rights and freedom come directly from God, not the government. It’s a great way to help your children understand how God and the Holy Bible have influenced our world.

The content may be hogwash, but the strategy is brilliant. Dress your religion-infused political ideology up as history education and tailor it for impressionable children. A similar strategy is used by creationists, except that their target is science rather than history.

Sometimes I think that those of us on the side of reason are at a severe disadvantage because we lack the kind of dishonest and dishonorable chutzpah that our opponents wield so effectively.

The web site actually says, in big bold purple text, "FAITH BASED U.S. HISTORY". One might think that would put people off, as it's practically an open admission that this "educational" material isn't grounded in reality. But these people know their audience. For the faithful, a disregard for reality is exactly what they want. After all, teaching their kids reality based history (or pretty much reality based anything) would be detrimental to their ideological goals.

Huckabee is going to be the featured speaker at that new alternative to the Boy Scouts. The one that is just like the Boy Scouts except that they do not allow gay kids in. Huckabee is nothing but a FOX/religious bigot.

Oh, and the original post...it is called brainwashing. Religions have been doing it for a long time. There is a cure for a lucky few...rational thought.

The scary thing is that a lot of people really believe that all our rights and freedoms come from a god. Never mind that it wasn't until the founding of the USA that anyone was willing to admit that people had natural rights in the first place - before then, it was all about the powerful having the rights.

And it took a pack of secularists and deists to do it. If the current Republican Party had been in charge of the Constitutional Convention, the USA would have been a theocracy, and while it might have done well (after all, large unexploited continent with just a few million indigenous natives on it), most of those rights and freedoms they claim came from God wouldn't have ever come about.

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

I'm not quite sure what the issue is. Lewis and Clark and Jesus explored the west, Moses brought the Declaration of Independence down off the mountain top, John the Baptist fought in all the major Civil War battles and the Tower of Babel was somewhere in Kentucky. Mr. Ararat is in West Virginia, the Dead Sea was in what we now call Oklahoma, Pontius Pilot was originally from just outside of Boston and the tomb of Jesus is on display at the Smithsonian, where it should be.

Tornado alley,hurricane alley,San Andreas fault-line,droughts,wage slavery,slavery,extinct middle class,oil spills,fracking,pollution,obesity,rapists not marrying their victims...this God sure has a funny way of showing his love for the USA

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There's no right there's no wrong,there's just popular opinion (Brad Pitt as Jeffery Goines in 12 monkeys)

The scary thing is that a lot of people really believe that all our rights and freedoms come from a god. Never mind that it wasn't until the founding of the USA that anyone was willing to admit that people had natural rights in the first place - before then, it was all about the powerful having the rights.

And it took a pack of secularists and deists to do it. If the current Republican Party had been in charge of the Constitutional Convention, the USA would have been a theocracy, and while it might have done well (after all, large unexploited continent with just a few million indigenous natives on it), most of those rights and freedoms they claim came from God wouldn't have ever come about.

Few million? I hope you're just referencing the 13 colonies. More like, for the whole of the US during that period to be around 10-15 million. Most Europeans (who did the casual survey and, perhaps, actually had been to the US) during that time period projected less than 3 million because, of course, white people (in their minds) are superior to all other races. Some estimate before Columbus there were probably around 30 million in the US alone.

Some estimate before Columbus there were probably around 30 million in the US alone.

The estimate of the native population size varies greatly. Some estimate it to be closer to 200 million. We'll never know, of course, but it was substantial, and whatever it was, it was both accidentally and purposely decimated. The first Spanish explorers going up the Mississippi, and finding endless Indian farms and villages on both sides of the river, didn't know that the pigs that they were carrying with them for food carried diseases that would wipe out those populations. (The next group of explorers to follow that path, 13 years later, saw no signs of people, or at least no signs or large populations like earlier reported.) Later the U.S. Army knew damn well that they were handing out blankets infected with smallpox. California paid bounties on dead Indians until early last century. However you measure it though, none should have died, millions did.

The large buffalo herds encountered by white explorers were apparently a byproduct of the diseases introduced by the early European explorers, which killed so many people and hence reduced hunting pressure on the animals, allowing herd size to explode. The same apparently goes for the Passenger Pigeon, which early settlers said flocked literally in the millions. The population of those birds too grew incredibly once the hunting pressures were taken off by the many Indian deaths.

We Europeans really know how to f**k stuff up. But at least we are still upholding the tradition, weather and other-wise.

None of which will be mentioned in the christian version of history. Even the secular historians seldom mention these things.

I'm not quite sure what the issue is. Lewis and Clark and Jesus explored the west, Moses brought the Declaration of Independence down off the mountain top, John the Baptist fought in all the major Civil War battles and the Tower of Babel was somewhere in Kentucky. Mr. Ararat is in West Virginia, the Dead Sea was in what we now call Oklahoma, Pontius Pilot was originally from just outside of Boston and the tomb of Jesus is on display at the Smithsonian, where it should be.

Unfortunately, this isn't particularly funny, because it isn't that difficult to put a religious spin on American history (provided you're more concerned with propaganda rather than facts).

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

Few million? I hope you're just referencing the 13 colonies. More like, for the whole of the US during that period to be around 10-15 million. Most Europeans (who did the casual survey and, perhaps, actually had been to the US) during that time period projected less than 3 million because, of course, white people (in their minds) are superior to all other races. Some estimate before Columbus there were probably around 30 million in the US alone.

So many died due to European diseases that I wouldn't be surprised if the total indigenous population of North America dropped to less than 10 million.

I define "a few" as three to nine. I know other people define it differently, so I should have been more precise.

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Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

The number I have been told is between 60-80 million.......in 500 years,near extinct....but not yet gone

I should have specified. The high estimate includes both North and South America, and not a lot of archaeologists and historians agree with it. But again, we'll never know for sure. Nor will we ever know the history of what was apparently the most peaceful part of the planet (outside of oral histories, which are not always shared outside the group). Yes, I'm sure there were little wars and battles between the various groups, but there is no evidence whatsoever that there were ever any huge battles of the Crusades/Genghis Khan/Huns/Waterloo/Stalingrad/Hiroshima size in the pre-invaded America's. The Aztecs, for instance, didn't have the slightest idea how to fight back effectively when a small Spanish force invaded their world.

PP from oral histories in my area of the world there were skirmishes,slave raids,pissing matches and the odd battle where a few were killed. Nowhere have I heard of massive battles,like Europe or other areas, that is until the arrivals of Eruo/Spanish settlers in N/South America's.

Logged

There's no right there's no wrong,there's just popular opinion (Brad Pitt as Jeffery Goines in 12 monkeys)

Some estimate before Columbus there were probably around 30 million in the US alone.

The estimate of the native population size varies greatly. Some estimate it to be closer to 200 million. We'll never know, of course, but it was substantial, and whatever it was, it was both accidentally and purposely decimated. The first Spanish explorers going up the Mississippi, and finding endless Indian farms and villages on both sides of the river, didn't know that the pigs that they were carrying with them for food carried diseases that would wipe out those populations. (The next group of explorers to follow that path, 13 years later, saw no signs of people, or at least no signs or large populations like earlier reported.) Later the U.S. Army knew damn well that they were handing out blankets infected with smallpox. California paid bounties on dead Indians until early last century. However you measure it though, none should have died, millions did.

The large buffalo herds encountered by white explorers were apparently a byproduct of the diseases introduced by the early European explorers, which killed so many people and hence reduced hunting pressure on the animals, allowing herd size to explode. The same apparently goes for the Passenger Pigeon, which early settlers said flocked literally in the millions. The population of those birds too grew incredibly once the hunting pressures were taken off by the many Indian deaths.

We Europeans really know how to f**k stuff up. But at least we are still upholding the tradition, weather and other-wise.

None of which will be mentioned in the christian version of history. Even the secular historians seldom mention these things.

From my understanding, North America alone had 200-500 million, if adding South America closer to 1.5 billion.

From my understanding, North America alone had 200-500 million, if adding South America closer to 1.5 billion.

-Nam

The 200,000,000 figure I quoted, which I got from the book "1491", which was for both continents, was put forth by the author as being admittedly on the high end of current estimates when the book was written. So I've not heard the much larger numbers you are mentioning at all. That doesn't mean it isn't so, I've just never heard numbers that high. If you happen to have sources, I would be interested.

Being as there were, by all estimates that I can find, fewer than half a billion people on the rest of the planet when Columbus made his voyage, (not counting native Americans), it seems unlikely, no matter how peaceful they generally were, that North and South American Indians populations by themselves would match or exceed the population of the rest of the world. But that is just me guessing.

The highest scholarly claim was apparently around 130-150 million (by Henry Dobyns), with the majority in Central and South America. Which makes sense - the most advanced indigenous civilizations were the Aztecs and the Incas, which means they would have been the best able to support large populations.

Logged

Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

From my understanding, North America alone had 200-500 million, if adding South America closer to 1.5 billion.

-Nam

The 200,000,000 figure I quoted, which I got from the book "1491", which was for both continents, was put forth by the author as being admittedly on the high end of current estimates when the book was written. So I've not heard the much larger numbers you are mentioning at all. That doesn't mean it isn't so, I've just never heard numbers that high. If you happen to have sources, I would be interested.

Being as there were, by all estimates that I can find, fewer than half a billion people on the rest of the planet when Columbus made his voyage, (not counting native Americans), it seems unlikely, no matter how peaceful they generally were, that North and South American Indians populations by themselves would match or exceed the population of the rest of the world. But that is just me guessing.

I don't have any sources. My information comes from an agglomeration of multiple books and articles I've read in the past 20 or so years. Based on those readings those numbers seem to be estimated; I'm no authority on the subject. It's probably more like what you say but I don't think anyone really knows. But some of the conclusions I read were significant in what was referenced as "lost tribes", some of which may not have actually been lost but just integrated into known tribes.